Will there still be free Baseball Mogul Online?

[DBS]

When you guys start drawing income from this thing will there still be a Beta testing or something like that?

DBS

[Japherwaki]

I would think not. The point of the beta test is to work out as many bugs as we can find before the guys at Sports Mogul start charging for the game. People would be complaining if they waited until the game went pay before they found and fixed these bugs, so they offered a beta test period. In exchange for our assistance in locating bugs in the game, they let you pay for free while they are doing so. It's actually a pretty common practice in online games. But once the game goes pay, the only people who will get to play for free are the people at Sports Mogul :)

Japherwaki

[BBM]

Remeber, there is always no free lunch in this world.

[John]

Blizzard's battle.net is free...

[Particleman]

Battlenet is just a matchmaking service though, when you play a game of diablo, starcraft, etc it does not use their servers, data is sent directly between the players. Massively Multiplayer games with persistent worlds, require a the software publisher to use immense amounts of server bandwidth, server storage space, etc. Unless the people at mogul sports decided to put like 10 pop up ads per page, they would not be able to make money (unless of course they charged user fees of course). Someone has to pay for the servers.

[BBM]

There are too many ads on battle.net, that's why it's free for us. Another reason, battle.net belongs to blizzard, and you buy games from blizzard in order to play in battle.net. BTW, battle.net is not a lunch.

[John]

A month ago I had the idea that in order to play BBMO it would be required to buy the CD. $30 times the 5000 people online is not bad. When the next CD comes out then it could be required to buy that CD. If Sports Mogul Inc. did this I bet the demand would be so high it would find itself in stores. Then comes the real mula.

P.S I've tried Season Ticket Baseball and it is very boring compared to Baseball Mogul Online!

[James Grove]

We considered making people buy the CD-ROM to play online.

Ultima Online and Everquest, for example, require the user to buy the CD-ROM for $20 to $40 before playing. But even then, the user gets a free month of play, then he has to start paying $9.99 per month for the game.

When you look at the economics of CD-ROM distribution, the game creator is lucky to get a few bucks per disc sold. That is not enough to support an online game for any amount of time.

Also, that effectively means that Mac and Unix users can't play the game. We wanted to get away from system compatibility problems.

We may add coupons in future games that entitle CD-ROM buyers to get a free month of online play, but that was a bigger task than we wanted to take on before we had the online game up and running.

-James

[James Grove]

Hi, guys -

I wanted to let you know that we have posted our first official launch announcement.

Click Here to read Clay's announcement. (http://www.sportsmogul.com/baseballonline/launch.htm)

Cheers,
James

[redsoxrob]

Clay,Dee, and James some improvements are a must for you to attract several of the testers to become regular paying clients.
1) NOT ENOUGH OFFENCE ---- many pitching staffs have sub 3.00 era and batting avg. of .225 - .255 completely unreal and NOT fun.this removes much strategy since so many incredible pitchers are on all teams regardless of farm and scouting spending.More are available thru rookies and dirt cheap free agents.
2) SIM TIMES ---- 10 sim days/real day is good slow playing time but 60 sim days/ real day is way too fast. A more Enjoyable time frame would be 30 sim days/real day , six days per week leaving Sunday for re-adjusting for some and rest for others.
3) FREE AGENT SIGNINGS ---- free agents end up signing for incredibly,ridiculous,unrealisticly low sums (1-4 pts) from Febuary onwards for long contracts and yet when season begins their demands are still rediculously low.
4)COMPUTER MANAGED OVERSPENDING ---- you must fix this bug that enables them to overspend at such levels that not only ruins the leagues in which these computer managed teams do this, but also prohibits paying clients to want to own these teams thus hurting your business and fun level of other clients by having less real people to compete against
5) CHEATERS ---- the single biggest problem and greatest determant of fun is cheating.If you cannot stop this than people will quit their teams and eventually their accounts.

Many of us testers would like to know BEFORE paying a monthly fee if the
1)offence is being enhanced 2) new sim speeds being considered 3) FA signing for realistic amounts 4)comp. managed teams staying within budget 5)what are you doing to ensure NO cheaters.
please respond to this post Clay because many of us are seriously interested in subscribing to your game without these major flaws.
redsoxrob

[Particleman]

The cheaters problem will probably be greatly reduced just from the fact that people have to pay for multiple accounts if they want to cheat.

I do agree, with redsoxrob on all the other issues that need to be fixed. These problems are significant and need to be fixed when the game goes live Oct 22nd.

The elimination of cheaters is something I am greatly looking forward to though.

[takaplan]

AHHH bbm will u ever learn. god i thought that you were getting better, but your ranting about the game going live is retarded. how do you expect sportsmogul to stay in business??????????????? this is great for sports mogul now that the game is going live! don't be such a cheapskate. i look forward to paying for this game and keeping such a great company alive.

[BBM]

Well, i know this game is a business to Clay and the fellows, but still, who wouldn't want this game to be free for a longer time, since there are still so many bugs laying around. BTW, i am staying for a 3 teams package.